


Amelia

by Angel_ite



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Character Bio, Character Study, OC, dishonored oc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-14 22:00:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15398415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Angel_ite/pseuds/Angel_ite
Summary: Anton Sokolov fathered an unknown number of children in his younger years, but none of them came back to haunt him quite like Amelia. Anton found himself sipping a glass of Tyvian Red in her abode—a practical fortress of stone and iron tucked neatly away in the outskirts of the Tyvian capitol. The year was 1853. His last wish was to beg for her forgiveness. He thought he’d be greeted by the fifteen year old aspiring creator. Instead, he was met with an amalgam of every mistake he’d made toward her. ((An OC character study)).





	Amelia

Amelia was born in 1820 near the old waterfront of Dunwall. Her mother, a governess to a number of noble children, had met Anton Sokolov during one of his lectures. They’d had several drunken rendezvous in which their time together was well spent. Everything rapidly declined when Sokolov woke up one morning with a wedding ring on his finger. A week later, the governess confessed she was pregnant and begged Anton to maintain the marriage at least until the child was born. If it was a boy, she had urged, at least he wouldn’t be born a bastard son.   
Consequently, the child was born a girl.   
Anton, desperate to annul the marriage and proceed with his studies under Roseburrow, agreed to send the governess a lump sum of coin to account for the child’s expenses.   
This is the only connection Amelia had with her father for fifteen years. Every now and again, she’d receive a parcel with enough coin to last her and her mother a month or so. A note would be attached, but she was never allowed to read them.   
In fact, Amelia hadn’t even met her father until the rat plague struck Dunwall. At fifteen years of age, the young girl lived with her mother in a poorer part of town. The older the governess got, the less work she seemed to find. Even Sokolov’s payments couldn’t afford them better living quarters.   
It was inevitable, really, that they both became quite ill with the plague.   
Amelia’s mother got the worse end of the stick; she was bed ridden within a month of the sickness. Blood from the eyes, coughing, graying skin. All the signs were there. Her daughter, on the other hand, took to it slowly for whatever unknown reason. She didn’t see blood in her eyes for quite some time and was able to write a letter to her father using the address he had written on all his little notes.   
Anton arrived within hours of receiving the message. He had come with several handfuls of his elixir, though known of them were perfected. It was all he had to give; his money was worthless to them now.   
This was Amelia’s first encounter with the Royal Physician. And her fever was so horrible, she was to dizzy to remember the exact conversation they’d had.   
Whatever it had entailed, Sokolov had begun to make weekly visits where he’d bring improved tonics. None of them were as effective as they should have been. Amelia felt a bit better the more she consumed, but her mother didn’t show similar progress.   
Anton soon got to the point where he was so caught up in the Empress’s murder and eventually the loyalist conspiracy that his visits became less and less on time. It was well before his abduction that he had completely stopped delivering elixirs to his daughter and ex-wife.   
He hadn’t realized the passage of time. His work in his laboratory would ultimately benefit all of Dunwall—his estranged family as well. Anton’s days blurred with hours. It wasn’t until he woke up at the Hound Pits Pub that the Royal Physician became fully aware of how much time had passed since his last visit to the old waterfront.   
Meanwhile, Amelia had spent a week boarded up in the small kitchen of her home. The door connecting the kitchen to the rest of the house was blockaded by a pantry, but she sat against it anyway. The weeper in the other room—who had once been her mother—occasionally bumped into the door in a feeble attempt at an entry.   
Amelia was running out of food and potion. She’d managed to hoard quite a bit of it, but the supply was depleting. Without a monthly payment, the water to their building had been shut off. All she had was a bucket out the window, dangling four stories up, to collect the rainwater.   
She was still ill enough to cough, but the blood from her eyes had dried up. She was getting better.   
Until finally, the food was all gone.   
Anton had just made it back to the waterfront that same day, having fled the Hound Pits after Corvo’s return. He stumbled into the apartment and found the weeper—the governess, his ex-wfie—sprawled across the floor with a knife in her eye socket.   
Amelia hadn’t left. She had huddled up against the opposite wall and cried.   
Shortly after, Anton had snuck the girl into his home and offered her clean clothes and a bed.   
As the philosopher struggled to get their affairs in order, he took no notice of his teenage daughter who roamed about his laboratory and living quarters. After his abduction, it had been a bit ransacked; guardsmen had taken off with quite a few of his expensive belongings but had curiously left his prototypes untouched. Paintings, stashes of money, and almost all of his elixirs were gone. Anton wasn’t too worried. He had money and he could always rebuild. Still, he couldn’t relax. He needed to find a suitable living space for his daughter. That night, he was up for hours.   
The girl, meanwhile, spent that time in his workshop, examining his notes and blueprints. He caught her taking apart a piece of an arc pylon and promptly sent her straight to bed.   
She didn’t sleep. It was his fault, she thought, that her mother had died. For Anton had never offered her an explanation for his absence. All that Amelia knew then—and ever knew—was what he had left them to rot. He had abandoned them, she thought, and had only returned to make sure the burden had been lifted.   
Amelia only spent twenty four hours with her father after fifteen years of time apart before he swiftly ushered her into the care of a small family he had known for a few years. The husband had worked with Anton (more distinctly, he had delivered countless crates of formalin soaked samples to the Academy and Anton typically signed off on these shipments) and was obliged to discreetly take the child in. He asked no questions about Amelia’s relation to the Royal Physician and Anton needed only to speak a simple lie in order to placate the delivery man. She was once a test subject for the elixir, said Sokolov while his daughter gave him a ghostly look, She’s one of the few who received the perfected dosage so I feel like she deserves to live.   
In her later years, Amelia would pace at night, wondering why she kept her mouth shut that day and didn’t tell the delivery man who she really was.   
He left her there.   
Amelia was, in fact, a genius and perhaps would have already been a prodigy had she been a boy. She wrote to him occasionally, saying in her letters what she did not muster the courage to say the day he gave her up. Amelia expressed her intelligence in every word and, had the receiver of such an eloquent and articulated document been any man except Anton Sokolov, it might have been noticed.   
As it happened, her adopted family did not offer her an education. They urged her to find physical work. By the time she was seventeen years old, Amelia had been retreating to libraries, conservatories, and public forums. She’d listened to her father give lectures, even, though she would hide in the back and cover her face.   
What she learned in those years, among philosophies and the basics of engineering, was that her father did not want her to enlighten herself. He hardly ever wrote back, but when he did, he had made it clear that he had likely fathered dozens of children and how genetics didn’t account for the transference of intelligence.  
Anton had detached himself from empathy and remorse—a crime that he would carry on his shoulders until he took his last breath.   
The young Sokolov had a collection of her father’s work (she’d sit outside the Academy of Natural Philosophy and steal books from the satchels of passing students or she’d rip out pages of novels in the local library wherein Anton artistically depicted blueprints) and kept them in a journal of her own.   
She applied herself. Began building. Tinkering. Failed several times. Started to adapt, learn, and succeed.   
When she turned twenty, Amelia left the adopted family and pursued her education on her own.   
Of course, the Academy turned down her application. Under all the printed text was her father’s signature.   
Neither father nor daughter ever discussed aloud their rivalry but nevertheless it persisted. Anton assumed Amelia wanted to expose the truth and cement herself in his world. Amelia assumed Sokolov didn’t want her to surpass him and take control of his legacy.   
This continued for a year. She would apply and be rejected. Apply. Rejected. Apply. Rejected.   
Until, at last, the young woman felt a fire ignite within her. She researched the written works of people snubbed by Anton in the past. The night she bought her boat ticket to Tyvia, she sat at the harbor and read Piero Joplin’s opinions on Sokolov. Though she knew they were allies now, it was comforting to relate to the words.   
By the time she was twenty two, Amelia was attending a small institute in Tyvia. It was nowhere near as renowned as the Academy, the but nonetheless, it taught her basic methods that allowed her to teach herself. She left before finishing, having all the information she needed to proceed.   
Her first creations were simple—morse-code transmission devices for navel vessels and whale-oil powered mining equipment for the salt mines. These earned her enough to eventually settle down and start working on her more personal projects in the capital of Dabovka.   
Anton’s knowledge of Amelia’s life between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-five was nonexistence.   
This is unsurprising. Tyvia is and was a remote nation composed primarily of incredible expanses of ice. Its cities—while more in number than any other nation—were far apart and inhabited survivalists or noblemen with no clear in-between. With half the year shrouded completely in darkness, it was an isle that very few chose to inhabit or even visit.   
Anton hadn’t heard from his daughter in several years and had assumed (after a letter from the delivery man stating that Amelia had left them completely) that she had either died or sailed away. The older he got, the harder this was on him. He regretted being distant and burying himself in his work. But there was no trace of Amelia—no way at all to contact her.   
Until, eventually, he returned to Tyvia and found that she was High Architect of the Tyvian People.   
As it happened, Amelia had climbed her way up the ladder using supply and demand. She had created inventions where and when they were needed, ranging in elaboration or necessity. Tyvia had inventors and engineers, but Amelia had something they did not—the legal last name “Sokolov”.   
Despite how much it infuriated her, the High Architect utilized her privilege and followed it wherever it lead her. Consequently, that resulted with a summoning by the High Judges wherein they offered her a position in exchange for the best she could offer them.   
Tyvia had always taken pride in its appointed autonomy granted after the Morley Insurrection. It thrived both culturally and individualistically, setting itself apart and longing to eventually surpass Gristol in history.   
And Amelia was ready to offer them creations far ahead of the time.   
When Anton found his daughter, she had actually sent someone to fetch him. She had that power now, and made use of it gracefully. Sokolov found himself sipping a glass of Tyvian Red in her abode—a practical fortress of stone and iron tucked neatly away in the outskirts of the Tyvian capitol. The year was 1853. Sokolov was weak and old, having returned to his homeland to rest and die at peace.   
When he had heard about Amelia, he longed for closure and redemption, eager to accept her summoning as a means to apologize and repair the damage done between the years. He hadn’t lied to her before; he had fathered countless children. But she had been the only one to haunt him after he re-read her letters and finally took notice of the potential he had ignored for almost a decade. His last wish was to beg for her forgiveness. He thought he’d be greeted by the fifteen year old aspiring creator.   
Instead, he was met with an amalgam of every mistake he’d made toward her.  
She was as cold as the Tyvian nights; her visage was one of the loveliest he had ever seen but her eyes were empty and hollow, like stones in her head.   
He couldn’t even speak due to the aura of intimidation he felt radiating off of her. She reminded him, all at once, of Delilah simply by the raw power of her stare.   
She spoke to him and he recognized in her words the lingering influences of a spurned Joplin and even a trace of Jindosh as she alluded that he would not be leaving this stronghold she had established.  
Sokolov, so completely alarmed by her transformation, felt like a doll that she carried from room to room. He had no words to muster, his apologies and pleas dashed on the rocks by the by her cruel smile and hooded eyes. Anton felt as like the old man he was, helpless as his biological and intellectual successor honored him by allowing him to see what she’d been working on.   
Amelia, having been influenced by Jindosh’s clockwork men, had taken the theory and reimagined it. The problem she saw was that relying on a machine’s intelligence and decision making was an unmeasurable risk. Even despite her tremendous lack of faith in humanity, she believed that the human mind was better suited for combat.   
She started with amputees. Men who had lost their arms in factory incidents or children crippled at birth. She made them mechanical prosthetics, a thousand times as strong as the typical human appendage. She gave them a new start, a tremendous miracle, and the Tyvian people loved her for it.   
What they didn’t know was that they were merely experiments. Phase two of her project involved the prisoners in the camps which the High Judges were sufficient providing her. She’d sedate them, then they’d wake up missing an arm, a leg, or maybe both. She’d present them with her latest inventions and they could make the choice between installment or death.   
Once she attached the limbs, she’d place them in a room with two or three other prisoners and offer the last man standing their freedom.   
As expected, the mechanical enhancements provided an outrageous advantage. The earlier models were only meant to excel in sheer power. But as she proceeded with her studies, she was able to perfect the concept minimization. Her most recent models were able to give off a charge somewhere between the power of an arc pylon and a clockwork. It could kill, but not incinerate. She explained to Anton, at the end of their tour, that her next step was to fit every Tyvian soldier with at least one extremity enhancement.   
Anton was petrified at the picture she painted before him of a world of chaos brought on by physically enhanced beings. One of his last thoughts, before the poison she’d put into his drink served its purpose, was that he needed to contact Emily.   
All at once, Amelia was the lone Sokolov.


End file.
